I know it's been a slow week in terms of my adding commentary on the world of enterprise mobility. For whatever reason, CTIA actually took a bigger toll on me than I would have normally expected. In any case, I had a discussion yesterday with a mobile application company that showed off to me their wares. They had some pretty impressive functionality on the application that runs on the device.
However, it did make me think about how the application gets managed by either the user and/or an IT administrator.
If you recall the mobility management framework that I created some time ago, I make the case that as mobile devices become managed more like traditional PCs, organizations will need to leverage scalable tools for deploying “standard” applications. Much like there are standard images for laptops, IT departments will also need to provide their employees a standard set of applications and configurations to help their employees maximize the benefits of their mobile devices. Also, as mobile applications become more pervasive, IT departments will need to explore ways to ensure that employees are limited in what they can install and remove from their mobile devices. As such, mobile application management should include:
- Remote/OTA application provisioning
- Automated application configuration
- Remote/OTA updates
- Remote/OTA backups
- Application removal
- Application white lists
- Application black lists
Unfortunately, not all mobile application solutions can do this. My sense is that mobile application configuration is going to become an increasingly important topic. Let's take the example of when someone is roaming internationally. The individual will need to have access to the data on the device, so you don't want the device management solution that you have in place (you DO have a MDM solution in place don't you?) to block international data roaming, but you do want the application to be aware of the fact that it's now going to cost you more to upload and/or download data. Shouldn't there be policies in place for that? Shouldn't there be some sort of throttle to provide core data access and then either provide warnings and/or prevent the individual from syncing data when you're roaming?
Let's take it one step further. Should this kind of functionality reside on the back-end of the application...or wouldn't it be nice if the IT administrator can view these kinds of options directly from his or her cross platform mobile device management console. Yes, it would be nice. What I mean by this is that the software platform publisher would provide open APIs that device management companies could then leverage.
The question is, what incentive would the mobile application providers have in doing so? Would they ever be willing to basically play a supporting role in mobility management to the device management console and solution provider?
